Lightning
by CelosiaGriffon
Summary: Hybrid movie/Beast Wars. An ancient warrior, trapped forever on the planet he once gave his life to protect, thinks of the things that haven't changed, the things that have, and remembers the things that he thought he'd forgotten forever.


**Edit: Epic. Writing. Fail. The wonderful Thing With No Talent was kind enough to point out to me that I made Dinobot look like a massive, abusive asshole... THIS, boys and girls, is why beta readers are a wonderful thing. I need a new one. I should probably stop posting at 2am, too... So, having said that, I've done some massive tweaks and edits and apologize profusely for the bastardization of my favorite character.**

**Aaaah. Yeah. I should be working on my FFVII stories. I really should. But right now all I want to do is curl up and write Transformers. So, here's the next random crack story. I blame this one entirely on my childhood Beast Wars obsession and my not wanting my favorite character to be dead.**

**This loosely ties into the same AU as Carnival of Rust, but no need to read the one to understand the other. I've taken and altered many elements of Beast Wars, since the movie continuity set up some things that make the original BW harder to do this way around. I didn't really like the time travel aspect in the first place, especially since they effectively re-wrote the original series canon by the end of BW. Other aspects I loved, so I'm incorporating many of them into my Carnival of Rust AU. Just take this as "there were Transformers on Earth WAAAAY before the Primes" and I'll explain the details later.  
**

**Obviously, Transformers and Beast Wars aren't mine. I am the happy owner of the two children in this story, however.**

**Warning: My beta reader is currently not speaking to me, so this story is un-betaed, so if you see a typo or something that doesn't flow right, tell me so I can fix it. -_-;;  
**

Twenty-seven. That was how many millions of years he had been on this planet. He had been on Earth twenty-seven million years, and the thunder storms looked the same. The lightning still struck the earth in bolts of white fire. The thunder still rolled across the desert as it always had.

And Damian's fourteen year old daughter was still sitting on the roof like she did every thunderstorm, uncaring that she was soaked to the bone. "One of these days you really will catch pneumonia out here, child," Damian scolded, affection and exasperation lacing his voice as he took a seat on the rooftop next to his youngest child, "or get struck by lightning."

"Is that a warning?" she asked bemusedly, "Or wishful thinking, father of mine?"

She was smaller than him. Human women were usually small, anyway, but she was growing more each day. Several million years of studying human character and biological traits left Damian estimating she would break six feet tall by the end of the summer, not nearly as tall as Damian himself, whose current human body had decided to settle comfortably at 6'7", but still very tall for a human woman. Damian had spent the last million years making sure such abnormalities were normal in his family.

The pair sat side by side in silence for several minutes, eyes turned to the heavens as one of Arizona's spectacular lightning shows lit up the night sky around them. As it always did, the Arizona lightning took Damian's mind back through the millenia to a time before humans, back to wars and fighting and more uncertainty than he ever would have willingly admitted. He could vividly remember nights just like this spent on the roof of a ship he had long forgotten the name of, watching storms that would have devastated humanity now raging all around him.

Just like the planet, his life was so much quieter now.

"Wishful thinking," he finally replied, not looking at his daughter. If he did, she would be able to tell he was bluffing. Human faces, human _eyes_ were so annoyingly open, so easy to read by anyone who knew how to. It made these little mental wars he waged with his daughter that much more difficult, but that was half the fun of it. It had been a very long time since he'd had someone to banter and argue with who could match him.

Or maybe he was just losing his touch after living among humans for so long...

"I thought fathers were supposed to be loving," she muttered sourly, crossing her arms, face written into a perfect scowl. "And here you are wishing for me to get hit by lightning!"

"At least then I wouldn't have to pay your ridiculous medical bills," he replied in kind, glaring out of the corner of his eye at her. She had been born with pale, blonde hair, just like his, like every child born into this family that Damian had created. He'd bred them that way. The last few years had turned her pale hair almost white before it's time as sickness ravaged her body, turned her from the powerful warrior woman he'd expected her to become into a frail, weak thing barely worth keeping alive. Two hundred years ago, he would have put her out of her misery at the first sign of sickness. Now, however, it would have raised far too much of an uproar in society if his youngest child had suddenly disappeared.

He was glad he hadn't.

"I didn't ask to be sick, you know, asshole," she snarled, turning the full force of her glare on him. It was a dangerous look, one that had been known to send men twice her size scurrying.

Damian grinned wickedly back at her, "and I didn't ask to end up with a _mouse_ for a daughter, but I got stuck with one anyway." The words fell from his mouth before he could stop them, and in the end he could not bring himself to regret making that comparison yet again. She was so much like him...

"Better than being a grumpy old fossil," she snapped back, flinging a large piece of roofing tar at him. He batted it away with ease, all the while berating himself. He shouldn't be getting so attached, shouldn't be allowing himself to get so close to this human child, shouldn't be drawing parallels between this silly little organic and someone long-since gone and dead.

It mattered very little that she was his daughter. He'd had thousands of daughters, thousands of sons, and all of them died while he lived on. His undying spark traveled from one human body to the next, unable to leave this wretched planet, unable to return to the world he had long forgotten. For millions of years he had lived like this, existed like this, carefully detached from the humans he surrounded himself with. He could not afford to get attached to one of these fleeting lives.

Abruptly, he stood up and walked back up the sloping roof to the bedroom window he'd climbed out of. "Hey!" his daughter shouted, "Where do you think you're going, old man?"

What should have been a relatively dramatic exit punctuated by the crash of thunder was instead ruined when a loose tile slid out from under Damian's foot and he crashed face first to the roof. When he looked back, he spotted the girl holding up a roof tile that she'd pulled loose. She had _made_ him fall! Damian wondered if this was Primus' way of punishing him. There was no possible way having a daughter so much like his old nemesis was a coincidence.

He got up, brushed himself off, and climbed back through his bedroom window without another word, leaving his laughing daughter out in the rain. Eventually, and hopefully before she got struck by lightning, she would wander back to her room or to her lab to work on some strange thing that would probably explode half a dozen times before she got it right. Damian glanced at the clock on his nightstand and let out a tired sigh. Ten after midnight, which meant it was now officially the anniversary of the day he'd been killed in the Endless War over four million years ago. It was also his daughter's sixteenth birthday.

Light filled the room as a stroke of lightning finally hit its target, drowning the house first in blinding light and then utter darkness. Damian felt more than saw his daughter step into the room next to him, the storm finally having managed to force her back inside. "Better luck next time," she whispered.

Once she was gone, Damian turned back to the window to gaze at the now shadowy night. The lights of the city, normally barely visible specks in the distance, had gone out entirely. Just for a moment, Damian imagined the world was dark again, that he was still with his old crew, that he could hear and smell and feel the familiar presence of creatures that had not existed in this world in millenia. Just for a moment, he imagined he might see them again, might argue with them again.

The light of a single candle entered the room, casting dancing shadows on the walls that, only for a moment, almost looked like familiar figures. "Weren't you just yelling at Brea for trying to catch pneumonia out in the rain?" Damian's son asked from the doorway. "And now I find you with your head stuck out the window." He waited a few moments for his father to reply, but when he didn't the young man just shrugged and continued. "Well, dinner's ready when you two lunatics want to come down. That crazy tattoo artist said he and his wife might come down, too, if the rain doesn't stop them."

"As if rain ever stopped those two," Damian muttered.

His son turned and left, leaving Damian alone in the darkness again. Away from the worried eyes of his son, the calculating eyes of his daughter, Damian could momentarily let his mask fall. So long it had been, a few centuries more and he might forget altogether. He could still see them, feel and taste and smell the world that the Earth had once been, the sensation of his claws tearing through some hapless organic creature long-since extinct, talon-like hands wrapped around the throat of a mech half his size, but still gutsy enough, or maybe stupid enough, to pick a fight with him.

"You coming, old man?" a voice, rebellious against him, or maybe against the sickness that made her weak, called him from the doorway. "I'm not having dinner alone with your son and his boyfriend. The mush'll fry my brain before I get the chance to appreciate his cooking."

"Away with you, vermin," Damian answered. He absently waved her away, "I'll be down when I feel like it." There was a sound of a bare foot smacking impatiently on the hardwood floor, and for some reason the sound alone was enough to take Damian right back twenty-seven million years. He spun on his heel and lunged at the girl standing in his doorway. It was a cruel and unfair attack, especially when he knew she was still recovering from her most recent bout of sickness. It did nothing to stop him, nor did the sound of her body hitting the wall or the sensation of her windpipe creaking under the deathgrip he had on her. Not enough to break, **never** enough to break, but enough that it would have frightened someone unaccustomed to the treatment. Even so, when his eyes met hers, there was only rebelliousness there, strength of spirit that her body had long-since betrayed.

'Why did she have to be the one to get sick?' he thought, watching the dance of emotions in her eyes, rebellion, amusement, irritation, laughter, anger, but never fear, never hate, and he wondered why that last one suddenly meant so much to him. 'Of all the children, all the lifetimes, why did this one, this child have to be the one brought down by sickness? What a warrior you would have been, child.'

And then she said it. "Fucking garlic breath!" she gasped, voice and airways constricted by her father's hands, "Stop breathing on me!"

Before he could stop himself, he had fallen into that familiar banter all over again. "That's quiet a lot," he snarled, "from a child smelling so strongly of death."

She snarled in rage and coiled up in his grip. "Shit-spouting old dinosaur," she snapped, planting a kick soundly in the middle of his gut. Both of them collapsed, Damian winded, trying to force air back into his lungs, his offspring just trying to catch her breath. It was the most alive Damian had felt in centuries.

Lightning flashed outside, illuminating the face of his child. She gazed back at him with a cocky, slag-eating grin worthy of the mech her nickname had come from and, just like that, a name he was sure he had long-forgotten came back to Damian's mind. "Rattrap," he breathed, unable to stop the sounds spilling from his mouth.

"What?" she asked, face pulling into a mask of confusion.

Damian quickly snapped out of his trance and he stood up, then pulled his still slightly winded daughter up by her arm. It was a small thing, something he would not normally have done for the sake of her own pride, but a small, nagging voice in the back of his mind reminded her that, barely a week ago, she had been confined to her bed. "Let's go," he ordered, pulling her after him, "before your brother comes in and yells at us for getting blood on the floor again."

Once he was sure she couldn't see his face, Damian allowed himself to smile. Little, weak, but still alive, still fighting, still forcing him to pay attention to her when he tried to push her away. 'Primus help me,' he thought, sparing the slightest glance back. The smile on his daughter's face immediately morphed back into a well-practiced glare. He, obligingly, glared back.

"Jerk," she muttered.

"Brat," he shot back.

"Stuck-up."

"China doll."

This time, she attacked him. The four inhabitants of the dining room barely spared them a second glace as Damian came tumbling through the doorway, irate daughter making a valiant attempt at choking him with his own hair and pinning down both of his hands at the same time. A steady stream of insults and cursing was coming from the pair.

"CPS would love this place," the dark haired boy setting the table muttered, "Do they _always_ do this, or is it just their attempt at scaring me away?"

Damian's son shook his head. "They always do this," the man beside him chuckled.

"Don't you ever worry?" the first boy asked, "That he might actually hurt her?"

"Never," the three others chorused. "He's too much of a stickler about honor to ever actually hurt her," the son laughed, then dropped his voice to a gruff rasp worthy of his father, "What honor is there in killing an irritating little china doll when her body will do it for me." He choked and reached for a glass of water. "Hate doing that voice," he muttered.

"Brings back memories," the only woman in the room outside of Brea herselfwhispered, shaking her head in exasperation. Her hand absently drifted to the wings tattooed on her upper arms, but her eyes went to her husband. "Doesn't it, Tiger?"

That night Damian dreamed of another world, a world of metal, inhabited by living machines far beyond any human imaginings. He dreamed of faces he thought he had long forgotten, of a world he had not seen in literally millions of years, and just for a moment, he got to see that everyone he had left behind when he died that very first time was alright. Changed, different, but still them, still the ragtag bunch of Maximals that had driven him nearly to the edges of his sanity every day.

But he also saw war, a changing world that, after millenia of peace, was about to fall into chaos again. He saw lives about to be destroyed, lives about to be built, and he suddenly knew that, before it was over, the Earth would be dragged into yet another war that was not its own. He thought of the few humans whose lives actually meant something to him, his human sister, Sarah, expecting her first child while her husband was overseas, his teenage children... and suddenly the last thing in the world he wanted, no matter what it might mean, WHO it might mean seeing again, was for the Transformers to return to Earth.

**Please R&R. Comments are always appreciated. Really appreciated, actually. And cookies to anyone who can guess who the "crazy tattoo artist and his wife" are.  
**


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